Now the afterword: The defunct push-to-talk Nextel network will continue to drag on subscribers.

“The Nextel network, if you will, is kind of the gift that keeps on giving,” Chief Executive Dan Hesse said during a second-quarter earnings call Tuesday morning.

Hesse said the Sprint brand will see peak defections take place next quarter as business customers who had both Nextel and Sprint accounts decide whether to stay with the company. Sprint has recaptured about 44% of the departing Nextel subscribers since it starting shuttering the network in 2011.

Sprint, the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier, lost about 1.05 million contract subscribers in the second quarter, up from 246,000 during the same period last year and 560,000 in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, Sprint continues to plug along on its network upgrade — albeit slowly, thanks to Nextel. Hesse said in an interview that upgrading the faster technology known as LTE has been like “playing with ankle weights,” because of the challenges in managing a second, separate network in Nextel.

Though Sprint is on pace to meet its LTE buildout goal of covering 200 million people by year’s end, “our schedule was much longer than it would have been for our competitors, because they have a much easier job,” he said. “A lot of people don’t appreciate just how extraordinary the effort is to unwind [the Nextel] acquisition.”

Sprint still has work to do before it can catch up on LTE. Verizon, the industry leader, covers nearly 300 million people in 500 markets. AT&T covers 225 million people in 328 markets. T-Mobile, which is also pushing hard on LTE, covers 150 million people. Hesse hopes Sprint’s LTE footprint will reach “competitive parity” with AT&T and Verizon by the early 2014.